Democracy Without Justice in Spain. Omar G. Encarnacion

      As far as the political class was concerned, the Pact of Forgetting relegated to the dustbin of history some of the most tumultuous happenings of twentieth-century Spanish history, beginning with the traumatic collapse of democracy during the interwar years. Franco’s Nationalist uprising of July 18, 1936, triggered the fall of the Second Republic, a legally constituted democratic government widely considered to be Spain’s first real experience with democracy. Unabashedly liberal policies—such as abolishment of the death penalty, civil marriage and divorce, suffrage for females, secularization of schools and cemeteries, and home rule for Spain’s national ethnic minority communities—explain the Second Republic’s reputation for political radicalism among its detractors and for political progressivism among its defenders. The liberalism for which the Second Republic is famous mirrored the political orientation of its founding fathers, which, according to Crow (1985: 292), were “as heterogeneous a mixture as has ever appeared in the pages of European history,” incorporating “intellectuals, liberals of various shades and colorings, some of whom were Catholics but most of them were not, Catalan and Basque separatists to whom the Republic meant local autonomy, and the Spanish left composed of the anarchists, the socialists, and the communists.”

      A prolonged and bloody civil conflict rather than a successful takeover was the result of Franco’s attack on the Second Republic. On the Nationalist side were the constituencies most vigorously opposed to the policies of the Republican government: the military, rural oligarchs, industrialists, the Catholic Church, and an assortment of right-wing organizations, including the Falange (Phalanx), a fascist organization whose motto, “One, Great, and Free,” and “strong Catholic sentiment” suited Franco “admirably” (Crow 1985: 348), and the Carlists, defenders of the Spanish monarchy. Popular organizations, such as the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), and the communist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) were the face of the Republican resistance. The left-wing orientation of these organizations permitted Franco to frame the Civil War as a Christian crusade to save Spain from the godless Republicans, a struggle not unlike the holy battle for the soul of Spain that medieval Christian monarchs waged against Muslim infidels. In this second crusade, “the enemy was not Islam but a hydra of social and political revolution that had flourished with the Republic” (Grugel and Rees 1997: 11).

      While at war in 1936–1939, Nationalists and Republicans fought with complete conviction in the righteousness of their respective causes, which explains the Civil War’s reputation as the quintessential conflict between freedom and fascism. By the time of Franco’s coup, the political center had disappeared, and politics had been reduced to a zero-sum game dominated by political groups at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.² Under the last government of the Second Republic, the Popular Front (elected into office in 1936 and headed by labor leader Largo Caballero), Spain took a decisive turn toward the extreme left, backed by a “workers’ alliance” embracing socialist, communist, and anarchist unions. The opposition, the National Front, a coalition of right-wing parties led by the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), a fascist-leaning party, represented its own kind of political extremism. Unsurprisingly, an intense ideological battle fueled the violence of the Civil War. As Crozier (1967: 216) put it, “The revolutionaries massacred the bourgeoisie because this, as they saw it, was their mystical and exalted class duty. The counter-revolutionaries killed because the ‘Marxists’ whose death they ordained represented the ‘anti-Spain’.”

      Franco declared victory over the Republican army on April 1, 1939, and soon thereafter all hostilities came to a halt. Aiding in the Nationalist victory was a significant military advantage: the most experienced troops in the Spanish army were those under Franco’s command. These troops, made up of many lower-echelon and young military officers, began to defect en masse to the Nationalist side as soon as the war started. The Republicans also made many tactical errors, and none more prominent than the decision to concentrate on a socio-economic revolution rather than on developing a strategy to defeat Franco and his army of rebels. At the inception of the Civil War, the CNT and UGT devoted much of their energies to collectivizing industry and farmland while ignoring the military conflict. Despite dealing a big blow to urban capitalists and the oligarchs, the socioeconomic revolution left the Republican side ill-prepared to defend itself against Franco.³ As noted by Payne (1985: 15): “What was left of the Spanish army in the Republican zone was largely disbanded in favor of leftist militia battalions that were full of revolutionary zeal and reasonably well-equipped but lack discipline, leadership, and military skill.”

      The Civil War’s international dimensions also favored a Nationalist victory. Sympathetic foreign leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco’s uprising from the start of the Civil War by providing the military weapons (aircraft in particular) and expertise that proved critical to crushing the Republicans. Britain, France, and the United States, despite “the intense degree of psycho-emotional solidarity with the struggle of the Spanish left” on the part of hundreds of thousands of French, British and American citizens, decided to sit out the war in Spain fearing that their involvement would trigger a European-wide conflict (Payne 1970: 275).⁴ Such fears left the International Brigades, the foreign, volunteer army that gathered in Spain to fight Franco, which organized some 40,000 soldiers, including 2,800 members of the American Lincoln Brigade, as the main source of foreign support for the Republicans (Richardson 1976: 11). Abandoned by its fellow democracies, the Second Republic turned to the Soviet Union for help in the form of aircraft, tanks, and political and military advice.⁵ But this assistance in the end proved incapable of overcoming Franco’s rebellion.

      The Human Toll of the War

      How many people perished during the Civil War remains highly debated among historians, and it may well be the case, as noted by Richards (1996: 157), that “we will never know the true figure.” One million is the popularly accepted figure in Spain since it was adopted, for very different reasons, by both the Franco regime and its opposition. For Franco, the figure of one million dead underscored his claim of having saved Spain from bloodshed, chaos, and destruction. For the opposition, it highlighted the grotesquely violent nature of the Franco dictatorship. Historians of the Civil War, however, have questioned the veracity of the figure. Arguably, the most respected accounting comes from Jackson (1965: 539), in no small part because it comes from a foreigner. This study puts the total number of the Civil War dead at 580,000. But even this greatly reduced figure, as seen in Table 1, makes the Spanish Civil War the deadliest by far of all European civil conflicts of the interwar era. Jackson (1965: 539) estimates that between 1939 and 1943 100,000 Spaniards were killed in direct combat, 10,000 in air raids, 50,000 from disease and malnutrition, 20,000 from Republican “reprisals,” 200,000 from Nationalist “reprisals,” and 200,000 “red” prisoner deaths resulting from execution and disease.

Table 1. The Spanish Civil War in Comparative Perspective